U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,660,934; 3,810,329; 3,924,354; 4,170,301; 4,189,868; 4,292,760; 4,329,813 disclose various types of packages used for transporting, shipping, and displaying plant products for the commercial market. These patents show known trays and transparent packages for plants.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,242,614 and 4,311,477 disclose packaging for growing and cultivating mushrooms. While mushrooms are grown with their root systems intact in these known packages, no specific correlation exists between the amount and weight of mushrooms for the consumer to use in these known packages. The consumer has no guarantee of the available weight of mushrooms in these prior art packages or that they will produce a preselected mushroom weight for the consumer's use.
Mushrooms are generally packaged in bulk by placing the whole mushrooms onto a flat tray overwrapped with a thin, flexible heat-sealable material. The processor picks the mushrooms from the growing bed, cuts the root system from the bottom of the stem, and places the various size mushrooms in a tray that is overwrapped to form a bulk package. The packaged mushrooms are then shipped to a warehouse and on to the store for the consumer to purchase.
The shelf-life of mushrooms is substantially ended when they begin to turn brown. Despite careful handling of the mushrooms during the processing and the expeditious transportation of mushrooms from the processing plant to the retail store in known packages, an extended packaged mushroom shelf-life is still desired.
Present mushroom handling procedures involve the gathering of five or six mushrooms in the picker's hand, cutting off the root system, and placing them into the tray container. Bruising of the mushrooms frequently occurs when the worker holds the mushrooms and when the bulk container is carried into the packing plant handled again in the weighing process. When the stem is separated from the root system, the mushroom begins to dehydrate through the cut stem. Bruising of a mushroom shortens its shelf-life in either a bulk condition or an overwrapped package condition.